The worst of 2023

 

Fandom is a balance between what you love and what you hate, otherwise you fall into a blind fanaticism that helps nothing but the pocketbooks of those who leech your money from you bit by bit. You have to know mediocrity in order to look it in the face and recognise it's shortcomings, if you don't call out the issues then how is the light of quality ever going to shine? The Marvel Cinematic Universe has dropped off a quality cliff in the past few years, but with people calling it out and noting how bad things have gotten, Marvel knows that changes need to be made in order to restore the trust of everyone. Whether or not they actually have the gall to go ahead and make those changes is really up to them. The same should be true in the video game world, where terrible messes of games should absolutely be called for what they are- even if our metric for what constitutes a terrible game might have shifted a little over the years as more insanity has dropped.

Afterall, there was a time when Forspoken was the worst anyone had experienced! Forspoken with it's annoying dialogue, lacklustre narrative, generic and uninspired world, and unengaging combat. (I know there are those who says it was really good, but I struggle to reconcile their insistence with having the thing in my hands.) Forspoken wanted to give us an Isekai story with a relatable cool-girl protagonist and a intriguing story with twists and turns. The problem is just none of those sectors of design came together in any quality fashion, which meant the worst parts glared out like swollen appendages. Chief of all being Frey Holland's dialogue which felt corbelled together from the worst 'witty Marvel protagonists' out there with a sprinkling of extra angst and swearing to whittle away any small hint of charm imbued therein. Forspoken cost it's entire studio as they were promptly shut down, and may have been a factor in the decision of Square to sell off all their Western Studios under the comment of "We don't know how to sell games in the West anymore!"

But that crown was soon stolen by a game that was easily so much worse than Forspoken- the majesty of 'Redfall', a game who's name had been bumping around Bethesda fan forums for years under the belief it pertained to a secret Elder Scrolls Project. In truth it was a confused four person co-op vampire hunting game made by the Dishonoured developers. (But not the main studio) Xbox threw the weight of their marketing efforts behind this game at the start of the year, making the game the belle of their conference- insisting to the world that this was going to be big. They probably should have checked the game first, though. Clearly low budget, creatively confused about how to work in the Arkane identity, plagued with even more 'witty Marvel Protagonist' dialogue, buggy to the point of lacking fun- Redfall was a painfully generic title cooked in a house of creative masterminds underneath the production of Bethesda- and it appropriately sank like a stone for it's sins. 

Which would have given that game the ultimate top spot for worse game of the year without a shadow of a doubt. If Gollum hadn't slid along in the next few months. I think there's a cognitive disconnect with the game Gollum. When people look back on it, granted the distance of time, they squint and comment about how the team were trying to do something, but their talents just weren't up to task. I concede that on paper they maybe had one half-decent idea: the Gollum-Smeagol argument system- but everything else was a total failure in even the design phase. Gollum had no idea what it wanted to be, at any point. A totally glitched to heck mess of painfully boring fetch tasks, mind-blowingly dumb minigames, unimaginably terrible stealth, and a typically bonkers main narrative results in a largely unplayable title. True disaster. Another developer shut down.

But surely that is the worst of the worst right? I mean, there's no way that things could get any worse than- Walking Dead Destinies. I think we all knew what we were getting into when we saw that first trailer with the half-decomposed ventriloquist puppets that were the cast of Destinies. A half decent idea was coined for the game I'll admit, giving the story an 'alternate reality' remodelling. But the game is trash. It's a barely functional mess of half-aborted ideas swirled together in a melting pot and served ungarnished and unseasoned. It is a pitiful, reeking, discharge that rather clearly never made it through a play test unscathed from criticism, or even through one at all. It is a vapid and vain attempt to hold onto a licence that the publisher should never have been granted to begin with, and god knows they should never be entrusted with a popular brand ever again- because Gamemill deliver only trash.

Which was further validated within the exact same quarter when Gamemill released 'Skull Island: Rise of Kong'- a game somehow even worse than Destinies! Kong is perhaps one of the most unfinished officially licenced games you will ever play, to the extent that one famous cutscene features the production still in lieu of the basic animation meant to replace it. The slap-happy gameplay is utterly unchanging and undeveloped throughout the experience, the level design carries the same aimless inanity that children slapping together their first game conjure up. The art direction is a disaster of colour and muddy textures. The models are ill-fitting within the same game and overall bad. That anyone has completed the game is a display of human excellence, because I was certain the thing had never been completed.

But somehow, even with everything bad about the year, my prize for the worst of the worst still falls squarely on the shoulders of The Day Before- simply for the scale of the grift matched with the absolute wasteland of the game delivered. The Day Before managed to fool Nvidia and IGN to be featured prominently on their channels, it led a lie for years about the range of their graphics or the quality of their design concepts, and when the other shoe started to drop they still managed to hide the extent of their disgrace with more false trailers that looked worse than the initial promise, but nowhere near as bad as the final game. The Day Before dropped like a stone from space, picking up momentum with every second until it impacted with such a force it destroyed the company within a blink of an eye- and that, by and large, makes it one of the worst of the year. The extra push over the finishing line would be the fact that entire game was an asset flip when delivered- capping off the worst of 2023's worst. What an honour.